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We Are Seneca Lake is an ongoing, citizen-based, grassroots campaign that seeks to protect Seneca Lake and the surrounding region from gas storage expansion by Texas-based energy company, Crestwood Equity Partners (formerly Crestwood Midstream). Crestwood’s intention is to repurpose the crumbling salt mines underneath Seneca Lake’s hillside into massive, unlined gas tanks for three highly pressurized products of fracking: methane (natural gas), and propane and butane (LPG, or Liquefied Petroleum Gases) and to turn the Finger Lakes into a fracked gas transportation and storage hub for the entire Northeast. Our intention is to direct the future of our community down sustainable, renewable pathways.

Before the methane storage project was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in October 2014, hundreds of citizens tried every possible legal means to prevent the expansion of fracked gas storage at Seneca Lake, a source of drinking water for 100,000 people and to object to a form of industrialization that places us in harm’s way. With all other avenues and appeals exhausted, we began engaging in peaceful acts of civil disobedience by blockading Crestwood’s gates. In the first year, 400 arrests took place at these gates. The LPG part of the storage proposal, not yet approved, lies in the hands of New York Governor Cuomo’s Department of Environmental Conservation. We Are Seneca Lake urges Governor Cuomo’s DEC to deny these permits.